


Causali-Tea

by Drel_Murn, nimblermortal



Category: Original Work
Genre: Economics, F/M, In-Laws, Parenthood, Podfic, Podfic & Podficced Works, Podfic Length: 45-60 Minutes, Slow Build, Tea, Time Travel, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-02
Updated: 2020-09-02
Packaged: 2021-03-06 06:42:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25529122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Drel_Murn/pseuds/Drel_Murn, https://archiveofourown.org/users/nimblermortal/pseuds/nimblermortal
Summary: A woman very bad at making tea invents a time travel device to brew the tea for her. Along the way she faces toddler tantrums, the threat of economic subjugation, and her in-laws.
Comments: 9
Kudos: 8
Collections: Pod_Together 2020





	Causali-Tea

# Streaming Audio

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# Downloads

  * [MP3](https://archive.org/download/causali-tea/Causali-tea.mp3) | **Size** : 51.6 MB | **Duration** : 56:25



Isva shook her cloak out before she came in, the better to not carry rain into the house. The porch roof was dripping slightly; it had held up fine until Isva set out, but some time in the interim the steady summer rain had soaked through. She would have to see to it once the weather cleared.

She turned to come inside, and found Anthem sitting waiting for her, nestled in a chair behind his knitting needles. He was grinning as asked, as if it were some inside joke, “Where have you been?”

“Seeing to the road,” Isva replied. She did every time it rained. The work was needful; this far up the hills, a bad storm could leave them stranded. It was not needful as frequently as Isva did it - every time it rained she was out in her cloak, inspecting the ditches - but it was peaceful with the rain falling all around and her dry and warm beneath the cloak. Anthem liked it indoors, but he was spoiled. “Are the children in bed?”

“Tucked in and dreaming,” Anthem promised. Isva hooked the kettle over the fire, and Anthem smiled fondly and said, “You left a mug steeping when you went.”

Isva grimaced. She was always leaving mugs about, in various stages of tea. Anthem had tried to remind her at first. After seven years of marriage, he had settled in to drinking them as found and complaining cheerfully about the bitterness.

“The roof’s leaking,” Isva said. “At the porch.” She sat near Anthem and pulled out her sewing, began to thread a needle.

“Job for tomorrow.”

“Will the rain be clear by then?”

Anthem shrugged. Some farmers, and especially the ones with injured joints, just knew when rain would come and when it left off again. Anthem, young and rich, had yet to develop this skill. He said, “I was going to take the children to the fields tomorrow, if it’s clear.”

“Both of them?” Isva’s hand froze over the mending basket in Anthem’s lap, the shirt - Mehndi’s - crumpling back into the basket. Anthem had only ever taken Davvi before.

“Time Mehndi started to learn crops from weeds. Davvi wasn’t much older.”

“A year. I’d grown accustomed to them.” She hummed a little, not thinking about it, a slow-time song. Anthem joined her in a companionable drone, but they both dropped out before the magic could start layering their voices into a fugue. “I’ll be lonely.”

She at once regretted saying it. Anthem had gone to the fields alone for four years before he started taking Davvi, and even now he only saw Mehndi evenings and when the weather was poor. Or pouring, said his voice in her head. He went down to the fields to learn his duties as heir apparent, and Isva stayed uphill in the pastures, tending the herds and proving she could manage a household. That she might one day be worthy of Anthem’s family.

Anthem, oblivious, poked Isva out of her reverie with a knitting needle and joked, “Send Davvi out with the cows, then.” When Isva snorted he added, “You’re forgetting your tea.”

“Bother,” said Isva, and took the kettle off the heat. “Almost I could conscience one of those fancy northern kettles that cry when they’re ready.”

That was Isva’s joke, poking at an ongoing family argument. Anthem made a face, unable to resist saying, “Scream, more like. They’d disrupt every song-working in the place. And I can’t _imagine_ what my parents would say.”

“You’re the one with the ear. Maybe someone will make a song that works around them. It’s almost a drone.”

“A horrible, horrible drone.”

“Something could be done with it, by someone smarter than me,” Isva said, with the usual twinge that came of knowing all her gifts counted for no more than a pick-up to the tune of the world. She had been born in the wrong key. Davvi too.

They went on talking as the light shifted from the window to the fireplace. Anthem was knitting a new sweater for Davvi, heavy work for summer but he hated mending, and Davvi was always tearing new holes to be patched. Anthem was impatient with it, declaring they could just get more clothes, or his parents could, but Isva had long since won a concession that Anthem’s parents couldn’t spoil the children any more than hers did, and so the mending was hers. She’d been through three shirts and was starting to question the light when Anthem said, “Your tea.”

“My… tea?”

“That you started when you came in.”

“My tea!” Isva started up, spilling her mending to the floor, stopped again to pick it up and fish the needle out, making certain that it wasn’t left where little feet would find it. The tea, when she got to it, was already hopelessly oversteeped and bitter. Anthem laughed at the face she made.

“Were you waiting again to see when I’d notice?” Anthem shrugged. Isva took another sip of bitter tea and grimaced. “I wish there were some way to have the tea done when one wanted it.”

Anthem whistled a few notes tunelessly. Isva considered that, and the bitter tea, and got up.

“I’ll think of something tomorrow. I’m going to bed. Don’t - go before I say goodbye to the three of you in the morning.” She opened the door, stepped out to dump her tea beyond the porch, and grimaced again as a leaking drop landed loudly in the middle of her head. “Maybe focus on the porch while we still have a roof.”

“I’ll ask my parents about shingles,” Anthem promised. Isva came inside, and kissed him goodnight.

It rained the next day too, so the three of them stayed home with Isva. Anthem had little interest in dragging a wet toddler around with him all day, and Isva rather thought his desire to take the children with him was for the grandparents’ visitation at least as much as it was for starting Mehndi’s floral education. In the rain, everyone who could would stay home.

So they did. Davvi was still all aglow from Aikvím Day the week before, when everyone dressed up as knights and farmers and reenacted the revolution - or at least, the parts about neighborly support in the form of gift exchange. Davvi’s motivation to be a guerilla knight and fight off the nobles had a lot to do with receiving presents, but Anthem took the opportunity to teach him history while Isva did barnwork, and then she taught him and Mehndi counting while Anthem worked on breakfast.

Counting in Taikaika was more rhythm than tally, a matter of teaching children to measure time to form the framework for songs they later used to manipulate the timestream. Happily that framework took a while to instill, or every child would just hum a hurry-up tune the moment they were put in time out and never learn anything. Isva’s family had always been quick to tally and slow to rhythm, so while Mehndi was just learning her first time-measure song, Davvi could still use the review.

Half way through the morning, there was a knock at the door. Isva broke off from the counting-tune she was trying to teach Mehndi. “Who would be abroad in this weather?” she wondered, but Davvi was already making for the door.

“Aibaba!” he announced gleefully, and Isva’s parents crowded into the little house, shaking cloaks out and shaking their heads. Mehndi sat confused, watching them, more familiar with her grandparents on Anthem’s side.

“This is your aimama,” Isva said, in case she didn’t remember, and to her mother, “We were just learning time-measure songs.”

“Ah!” said Amma, and settled her skirts down around Mehndi. “I remember teaching these songs to your amma, do you mind if I sing with you?”

“Sorry for just bursting in on you,” said Baba, scooping Davvi up across the room. “We saw the clouds last night and thought there would be more rain today, and you’d be home.”

“Not at all, not at all - if you don’t mind drinking skyr,” said Anthem. “I wasn’t planning on guests for lunch.”

“Love some,” said Baba fervently. “They’ve banned it in the market and you can’t find any at all in town.”

“Banned?” asked Anthem.

“Unhygienic, apparently. Never bothered us Taikvey for the last hundreds of years, but I guess the Shoal-folk have weak stomachs.”

“Well, anyone who didn’t like it just sang past that part,” said Amma, and laughed. “That road is terrifying, no wonder you’re so concerned, Isva! The drop off to the side… one mudslide and the whole road would be gone.”

“Yes, it’s always been like that,” said Anthem. “Why should foreigners get to say what’s sold at market?”

“Oh, you would care about that, with all the milk you make up here…” Davvi squirmed to be let down, and then disappeared behind Baba as soon as his feet touched the floor. “Well, you know, they’re bringing us all these fine things from all across the Soha Sea, steel and kettles and knives and all, no one wants to upset them. It’s no trouble, they eat cheese as happily as anyone else.”

“It’s a taisk market, they should eat taisk food,” said Anthem.

“You sound like your parents,” said Isva, and Anthem shot her an alarmed look.

“It’s Asholl,” said Baba. “Their wind-singing dominates trade across the Soha Sea. No skyr in the marketplace is a small price to pay for all the goods they bring. We can have our skyr indoors, they just have to meet restaurant regulations.”

“Mm,” said Anthem, obviously trying not to sound like his parents. “So Asholl tells us no skyr in the market, and the skyr goes indoors, and we’re grateful they don’t send armies.”

“They wouldn’t send armies,” said Amma from her place on the floor.

“They’ve done it before, in Kol,” said Anthem.

“We’re not Kol.” That was Baba, chiming in cheerfully like this was a well-familiar part in a fugue. “The Shoal wind-singing is useless on land. You haven’t seen the army drilling canons - those Shoal-folk wouldn’t stand a chance, they can’t even carry a tune.”

“They don’t have to. Their wind-working doesn’t go through song,” said Amma, with the air of someone who had said this many times before.

“What would I know about it?” Baba asked, in evident enjoyment of his role. “I’m no witch. And there’s another thing - they hate witches worse than we do.”

“What’s a witch?” asked Davvi, appearing from behind Baba, where he had been trying to look both grown up and invisible.

“Teaching the child words like that,” said Amma disapprovingly to her husband. Isva retrieved her son, who had been succeeding too well at invisibly escaping his lesson, and he promptly wriggled away from her and went to stand in the protective hollow between his grandparents, still looking for someone to explain this new bad word.

“A witch is someone who learns the local magic from a different place,” said Anthem. “It’s a very bad thing, to steal magic like that, and you never know what sort of trouble those people might get up to. But you needn’t worry - there’s no one like that in all Taikaika.”

“Speckled Goat once fought a witch,” said Baba, summoning Davvi’s favorite bedtime story hero. Amma shot him a worried glare, but the story that followed involved quite a lot of fruit and nuts that were incidentally going into the skyr, very little magic at all, and a time-measure song with a call and response for Davvi and Mehndi to practice. This successfully delivered Davvi back to his lesson, with which Baba continued to help while Amma and Anthem went to look at the milk reserves in the cold cellar and discuss cheesemaking.

When her parents left again that afternoon, Isva stood under the porch to wave them away. The roof was leaking more under the onslaught of rain. Throughout the evening Isva kept ducking out to worry about it until Anthem promised to send a child up from the main house the next day with a basket of shingles and a crook to mind the animals.

It turned out to be two children, and they found Isva asleep in the pasture. It was peaceful there, stretched on a rock above the wet ground with no other work to be done, listening to scattered lowing. She thought she had just laid down when she felt a warm wet wind on her face, and opened her eyes to see a pair staring back at her from two inches away. Isva startled upright, and butted heads with the child on the way.

“I left your shingles at the house,” said the older child, a boy who looked on solemnly as if he had had no part in Isva’s awakening.

“Thank you,” said Isva, her mind clouding sleepily with names and relations - Edsel’s boy Balang and niece Fermata, who was living with them after the fire in the spring, Edsel was a tenant and the three of them worked…

“We’ll watch the herd, you can go,” said Balang, eager to be free of adult supervision. Isva came down off the pasture, plotting what to do with all the milk the animals produced when the road was still soft and they couldn’t sell skyr anymore. It would have to be cheese, but that took longer, and she didn’t know if the cold cellar would hold all that they produced in that time, unless they made more regular trips to market...

She was in a bit of a grey mood, a fey mood, her mind always elsewhere. In the pastures she thought of the milk, when she got home it was the soft road, and on the roof with the shingles she kept absentmindedly drifting away, thinking of the rain and the tea and the intermittent leak in the roof. Of water, and music, and time.

She did a rather sloppy job on the roof, and soon found herself holding one of Davvi’s torn socks over the water barrel, watching water trickle out of it and thinking of the sounds of the rain, of wind over bottles, and of milk filling a bucket, the thud of a boot against a barrel to check by sound whether it was full or not.

Water was liquid was music. Was time. Lives ran like water over a pasture, trickling and tinkling away until they were gone. Anthem would laugh at her when she told him. The pasture was time, and the water ran downhill, though some drops ran faster than others and some might still in puddles.

Time as land. A joke, when everyone knew time was music. Isva set the sock down and went to muck out the barn, wondering what her brain was trying to tell her, and where they would find the time to turn all the milk barrels in the cold cellar to cheese. Now that they couldn’t bring them to the market as skyr they would need more labor, and she didn’t think the children would suffice.

When she finished with the barn she went back up to the pasture and sent the children home over their protests, their reluctance to leave such an easy day’s work.

“Mehndi will want to know what the brown cow did today,” she told them. “If you see the three of them on the way back, tell her.”

“Don’t you want to know, then?” asked the girl Fermata.

“Many and varied are the adventures of Brown Cow.” And much recycled from the days when Davvi asked after Speckled Goat. These days, he mostly dreamed about riding the horse, when he came out to the pastures instead of the fields. And about doing battle with wicked nobles who sought to tell the good Taikvey people what they might and might not do. “I’ll make something up,” she said.

“That’s _lying_ ,” said Fermata.

“Telling stories mostly is,” said Isva, and sent them on.

The next day Anthem left both children to Isva to take up to the pastures, either because he was tired of looking after both of them or because they were worn out from new experiences. Isva hadn’t asked which. Mehndi was glad to see the brown cow aain, and Isva was happy to have the both of them back, until about midday when she took them back to the house to feed them and found Anthem’s mother waiting for her, squatting by the fennel at the front door and humming a hurry-up song.

“Why is Eymama here?” Mehndi wanted to know, and as they approached and Elavin didn’t move, “Is Eymama okay?”

Isva supposed that to a child who hadn’t seen this before, it might be frightening - the breathing so slow it almost didn’t appear to exist, the occasional drop of a single note from the layered voices of a hurry-up song, drifting out of the singer’s timespace to the external continuity. She said, “Eymama is fine, she’s just waiting for you. I’ll let her know you are here.”

Isva whistled the bright, polite flurry of notes that alerted someone there might be a reason to return to a normal time flow, as opposed to interrupting their tune entirely. Elavin stood and turned, still a trifle slow as their timestreams matched up, and then reached down to give Mehndi a hug, swirling her up out of it into her arms.

“Mehndi-Mehendi!! And Davvi there too - hup!” Elavin hoisted Davvi onto her other hip, not a position Isva would have liked to hold for long. They said their greetings as Isva unlocked the house - locked less against burglars, this far up in the hills, than it was against Elavin’s discovery that it wasn’t locked. Anthem might be her heir, but until he was given governance of the farm, he was little more than a glorified tenant, sent to the hills to watch the animals and learn to manage a household. 

“What brings you up this way?” Isva asked.

“Anthem said you always oversteep the tea,” Elavin said, “and I wanted to see Davvi.”

“I’m working on it,” Isva said, stung even though she knew Elavin was teasing, and prodded the fire up. It certainly was easier to get lunch with Elavin keeping an eye on the children - and spoiling them terribly. She had brought Davvi a new handpan, and while Isva put together sandwiches Elavin sat and benevolently watched Davvi tap it.

“You can see him thinking,” she remarked to Isva, who was pouring the water. “He’s going to be a great composer one day.”

“Mm,” Isva said, and smiled, and nodded.

She remembered her mother making the same boast about her when she was a child, frequently enough that Isva had spent a dismal portion of her childhood frantically studying patterns in melody and harmony, memorizing notes of scales and keys, practicing solfege, trying to find some way to cheat herself into musical genius instead of the useless fixation on the way rivulets ran ruts in roads that she had settled into after at last being rejected from the conservatory. So much for her unmusical cleverness.

She thought Davvi ran the same way - the way he counted birds and explained their behavior to her rather than imitating their calls, and Mehndi loved stories but struggled to learn the nonsense tunes that went with them. They had Isva’s useless gifts, and while she couldn’t save them from ignominy, she hoped to shield them from hopeful comments like Elavin’s, if she could think how to.

“It’s a fine drum,” she said. “Is that from the port?”

“The metal is. I had the drum made locally,” said Elavin. She and her spouses were patriots determined to use their wealth on behalf of Taikaika in the face of ever more foreign imports. That was their unmusical cleverness. Isva murmured noncommittal praise.

“I brought the extra for you,” Elavin said, fishing in her pocket. She pulled out a roll of metal that Isva knew immediately was not the same as the drum - this was softer, paler, flexible. Tin, and very pure. That had to be northern make - and that Elavin, of all people, would buy northern metal just for Isva both touched her heart and filled her with a foreboding like Anthem talking about the armies that had sacked Kol.

“Thank you,” she said, not knowing what she had done to deserve this, not knowing what to do with it. She and Elavin had never been particularly close. Maybe Elavin wanted to change that. Why now?

“Well, I hear it’s good for repairs,” said Elavin, hurrying the words, and Isva realized Elavin had been humming - without the repetition of a timeslip, just some scrap of ballad, what had it been? “I should be going,” said Elavin.

“You haven’t had tea yet.”

Elavin snorted. “With it steeping all this time? I’ll do without. Go on up to the pastures, I’ll send someone with another block of tea.”

“Do you need help down the mountain?” Isva asked, and regretted it. Elavin’s chin jutted out.

“I’m a grandmother, I’m not old,” she snapped.

“Just asking,” said Isva, and only realized later that she should have suggested Davvi go with Elavin, that Elavin would not say no to a grandchild’s protective accompaniment. Another sort of problem Isva’s cleverness couldn’t solve.

And Elavin was right: the tea was deathly bitter.

“I have an idea,” she told Anthem.

“Oh dear,” he said from the floor, buried beneath their children. Isva was sitting up, hypothetically mending, actually fiddling with the tin.

“For the tea.” Now that she had brought it up, the words flew away from her, the concept too elusive to gab, running out of her hands like water. Music and water and time.

When she was still training to be a musician she had been taught to breathe deep, wide, to make a bowl of her belly to hold the music in. She breathed now, and said, “I want to suspend the hot water in a bag with a hole at the bottom, so that it drips out onto the roll of tin. The tin pockmarked like a tiny drum, so the water hits it like Davvi’s hand on the drum. And turns it. I think the turn might be the most difficult part, the suspension… The water should play a tune, to make the tea come out right.”

She’d taken too long. Davvi had captured Anthem’s attention with a leaping tackle, and Mehndi was - Isva bent down and removed Mehndi from Anthem’s leg just before she bit.

“You want to make a drum?” Anthem asked, holding Davvi suspended in the air as he flailed and giggled.

“I want to make tea that plays a tune,” Isva said quickly.

“All right,” said Anthem.

“I’m going to - shirk my duties,” Isva warned.

“Isva.” His tone was solemn, but Davvi was not. Anthem backed up a few paces and swung Davvi wide, round and round til he swayed. When Anthem set him down, he staggered and giggled as he wove his way across the floor, step syncopated. Anthem, one hand on a chair to steady himself, said quickly, “I owe you. You’ve given up so much to live here, with me, over my parents, with my inheritance, mothering my children - whatever you want. You deserve the time.”

“I -” said Isva, and Mehndi bit her, and all her attention was then on telling Mehndi no and arranging a time out, and then warm milk and bedtime, and then Anthem was tired and he and she went to bed also. It was just as well, she thought, watching him sleep in the moonlight. They weren’t demonstrative people, not like that.

Isva’s lutiery tools were in a bag in storage, things she had collected and misused before. It felt good to be making things again, sitting at first in the fields with the animals, fending off importunate goats as she poked and prodded at the tin. Then Anthem sent Fermata up again, and Isva sat at home, reheating the tin so she could rework it.

This was the long, boring part of creation that was where inventors stalled. Easy enough to have an idea; people had ideas all the time. If ideas were all one needed, everyone would be an inventor, or a composer. The difference was in the skills one built, learning to write those ideas down and to sit still until one did, deciding which ideas to discard and, when one was worth keeping, committing to it.

She’d spent five years taking cows and goats and sheep up the pastures with one child or another. The commitment was boiling over in her fingertips, waiting to come out. She almost wished for fiddly wire bits - but those would come with the suspension.

She whistled to herself as she worked, expelling frustration, and gradually the whistling became the slow-down song she was working into the tin, each note intermittent, the tune haunting the space between her ears. Her shoulders ached. Her fingertips scaled over with the heat of reworked tin. Her mind sparked.

Davvi, when he had the patience, liked to sit in her lap, asking what this was and what that and forgetting a moment later. She gave him scraps to play with, when she had them. He liked them as well as his drum, and no better.

Amma and Baba had much to say about the drum when they came to visit - bringing a recorder, the second time. They noted that both children were growing, and that the Shoal-folk had suggested some changes to the tariffs and customs screenings at the docks, which made Anthem go quiet and ask Elavin up to talk about it. Elavin was incensed, and had brought a petition to the mayor signed by concerned landholders, but the merchants liked the Shoal suggestions, to Elavin’s animated disgust. Isva supposed she ought to care, but it was hard to believe in anything changing, up here where the world was quiet. Elavin said that sort of passivity was part of the problem.

More subtly, Elavin was disgusted with Isva. She didn’t say as much, but Isva could feel it. Anthem had Balang and Fermata up to watch the flocks, and he was asking for additional help from the main farm turning the milk he carted down there to cheese so it could be sold, and here was Isva playing about with tin.

As an apology, Isva tried to help with the cheese, whenever she was not working, and fretted about the wear on the road and the chores she was forsaking and the theft of time from the main household. Anthem told her not to worry about it, and looked at her like he was waiting for something, and she scurried back to her workspace so she might have some progress to show him.

The rain had turned cold before she finished. It would have taken longer, but this was not so far removed from work she had done before, making instruments like Davvi’s drum, just finer work, and balanced. She’d had to use a sieve for the tea instead of a bag, and block it up all but the place she wanted the water to come out. And unblock, reblock, find ways to make it run slowly through the hole… It was not the initial creation that took months, but the refinement. Even Anthem was tired of her puttering by mid-autumn, tired of being handed a mug of tea only for Isva to take the thing apart again to make it drip a slightly different speed.

At least by slaughter season she had reached a point where she could set her tinkering aside and help with the heavy work of the pasture year, flexing different, broader muscles before diving back into the tiny adjustments that captivated her days. It captured her attention so closely she barely took the time to be grateful the road had held for its heaviest usage.

There was no moment of reveal, no single cup of tea that rewarded her efforts; just, eventually, a roll of tin that she was satisfied with. She heated the water, poured it into the altered sieve, and listened to the flurry of slow-down notes melding into a babble like creek water, like the winter storms that were starting to roll in from the sea, hit the high pastures, and race back down them in streams. And there was a full cup on the table, still lightly steaming. She picked it up and took it to her chair, sat back with a sigh.

“I want a drink,” said Davvi. Isva sat forward again and offered the cup to him.

“It’s hot, be careful,” she said. He was careful, and burned his tongue anyway, and went back sulking to his milk and the block tower he was building for Mehndi to knock down.

“I think I might have Elavin up for tea,” said Isva.

“Are you finally satisfied, then? She’s been wondering what you’re up to,” said Anthem.

“Did you tell her?”

Anthem shrugged. “I told her you were building a better teapot. Your tea is good, when you use this thing.”

“It’s - thank you,” said Isva, reminding herself to take credit even though all she had done was quantify what it took to make good tea and make sure she was never responsible for that. “We should have Elavin up anyway, it’s going to be winter soon and it may be her last chance to make it up this far.”

“She’s not _old_ ,” Anthem said. Isva was going to comment about Elavin saying so every time she came up this way, and then she caught sight of Anthem’s face - not entertained, nor quite threatened, but stricken, perhaps. His mother was growing old. There were things she could no longer do.

It hurt Anthem, though Isva was used to the idea. She was her parents’ youngest child, and they had never been young to her. But she could remember the betrayal of realizing her parents were no longer strong, that they felt pain, even though she had always known to expect it. Known that they would never make it up that road in winter. And that one day that frailty would come for her.

Silence lay between her and Anthem now, heavy and brittle. Isva fled the subject, scooping Mehndi up from amid a wreckage of blocks. “Are you a lion,” she demanded, shaking until Mehndi shrieked with laughter. “Are you a lion, to demolish castles so?”

“You could have just asked me to make the tea when she’s here,” Anthem said.

“What, and continue drinking bitter swill myself?” Isva asked, tossing her lion in the air and then setting it down so she could chase it.

“Lions don’t run away,” Davvi interrupted. “Lions chase!” And he roared in turn. Isva squeaked and hid behind Anthem.

They had a small game of lion chase before Anthem announced that little lions were carried to bed in their parents' mouths, and did they want to try it? Isva was briefly concerned about his teeth, but ultimately he just held Mehndi below his mouth and growled menacingly as he carried her off. Davvi watched until Isva swept him up and followed. By the time they reached his bed, Mehndi had bitten Anthem and was in disgrace, and Davvi was very superior about being put to bed with dignity like a big boy.

“Is Eymama coming to visit tomorrow?” Davvi asked a while later, as sleepily as Isva could have wished.

“If your father carries the invitation to her,” Isva said, “and she doesn’t have her own plans.”

“Good,” said Davvi, and turned over. “Then Mehndi can stay here with Brown Cow, and I’ll go downhill like a big boy.”

Isva raised her eyebrows at Anthem, who shrugged.

“Balang’s a bigger boy and he comes up the hill to the pasture with Speckled Goat,” she said. “I heard that Speckled Goat once ate the moon...”

Anthem took Davvi and Mehndi both down the hill the day Elavin came. Took away the levee between Isva and Elavin, the safety catch of having children to love and look after. He left Isva surrounded by a great, echoing, empty world, alone in the house, waiting for her mother-in-law. She made tea. She drank tea. She waited, listening for Balang and Fermata up the hill. She was nervous.

Elavin knocked at the door only briefly before Isva heard the first notes of a slow-down song. She got up and hurried to the door, her latest mostly-empty mug still on the table. Elavin dropped the song when the door opened, her eyes widening with surprise.

“Welcome, come in,” said Isva.

“Of course, of course,” said Elavin, stepping inside.

“It’s a lovely day out, isn’t it?”

“Oh, not so nice, this late in the year. I was going to skip some of it,” said Elavin. “At my age, you can afford to be choosy.”

“And it’ll be awhile before Anthem and the children come back,” said Isva. Elavin smiled admission, hands spread, but Isva was struck seeing Anthem’s half-laugh on her face. It felt a bit friendlier, to have that between them. “You wanted tea?”

“And to sit with my daughter,” Elavin agreed. “Have you been indoors all morning?”

“I didn’t want to miss you. Not one second,” Isva said. There was a pause, as if they were still coming off of different time-streams and their tempos had not yet met.

“Well. I hear you have been finding ways to spare those seconds,” Elavin said. “Anthem said something about a new way of making tea?”

 _Is that all he said_ , Isva thought. She put the kettle on, murmured something about waiting for the water to get hot - “I haven’t thought of a way to address that aspect yet, but if you were really worried you could get one of those northern kettles that screams at you. Perhaps rig a similar tin canister over it to…” She stopped. Elavin was frowning, as politely as she could manage, but frowning.

“Northern kettles,” was all she said.

“I didn’t say I liked them,” said Isva. “Just that they do the trick.”

“They’ll do all of us in the end,” said Elavin darkly. “Every house in Taikaika stuffed and screaming, and after the kettles comes the rest of it - economic subjugation is what it is.”

“It’s just a kettle,” said Isva. Elavin huffed.

“You know down in the market they’re all speaking Shoal-pidgin? You can natter all day about it being the language of trade, but that’s a taisk market, and we Taikvey can’t do our own business in our own language in our own city.”

“I’m not going to buy a kettle,” Isva promised. “And this is no northern gadget. This is a taisk innovation.” She wouldn’t say, _Mine._

“Have you whistled it up a name then?” Elavin asked. Isva shrugged.

“Not my forté.” She waited a tick before realizing she was waiting for Anthem, for his _More your piano, and our pianoforte_. “Perhaps Mehndi will whistle one. Or you might.”

“Name it after a flower,” Elavin said. “Some tea flower.”

They talked about flowers, then, and growing things, camellia and other theaceaes, the fennel by the door, what might bring a spark of color to the herb garden. Isva looked over her shoulder to monitor the kettle, and brought it round when it was hot, poured it into the elevated bag that had taken up the center of the table. Elavin stiffened as she heard the first note plink into the tin - it took a few before the tune caught and the tea really began to percolate - and then she relaxed again.

“It’s rather nice,” she said. “Having a tune there with no one to play it. You might do something with that.”

“More than just a tune,” Isva said, because it _did_ something, it was _composition_. She had come through metal to music, the back way perhaps, but it was music that worked on the world. “Do you recognize it?”

Elavin’s face screwed up, and Isva listened anxiously as the notes became more regular, and then faster. And Elavin laughed.

“It’s a slow-down song!” she cried. “Whatever made you think of that? It’s backwards - it ought to be a hurry-up.”

“You, actually,” Isva admitted. “When we came off the pasture, Mehndi and I, and you were there hurrying things up - for us it was all very slow, you know how it is, because you were moving faster. So it’s the inverse, really. The singer thinks they are going slower, but the person who wants tea,” she poured it, “hears it as fast.”

“And there it is,” Elavin said.

“No time for even me to get distracted,” said Isva, and watched Elavin take a sip. The older woman’s eyes closed.

“Delicious,” she said.

“I’m so glad you enjoy it,” said Isva, surprised by the earnestness in her own voice. She poured her tea, and hummed a little slow-down song to make the moment last, watching Elavin sip her tea and gaze out the window to the pasture and look truly happy while sitting at Isva’s table.

“It reminds me of when I lived here,” said Elavin, surprising Isva, but of course she had lived here once, when her parents were alive and she was the heir as Anthem was now. “I miss it, almost…”

“Would you go back, if you could?” asked Isva.

“And lose Davvi, and Mehndi and Anthem? Never,” said Elavin. “It was just the tea and the flowers in the sunlight, making me miss old times. This was clever of you. Humoreske.”

“I’m so glad you like it,” Isva said again. “I was thinking to make a few more of them, for you and my mother and -”

“More of them? Whatever for?”

“Well - shouldn’t more people get to drink tea the way they like it?”

“Certainly, and most people don’t need a silly contraption to do it. I thought you’d go back to the fields now you’re finished with your little fancy.”

“Well no,” said Isva, confused. “I was going to make more of them - sell this one to get the tin, and give a few presents. And then I suppose if people wanted them I could make a few more after that - build it into a sturdier one-piece design -”

“ _No_ .” Elavin stood up abruptly, her tea half finished, and loomed over Isva, who shrank into her seat. “Foolish child. Spread _that_ into the marketplace? Not while I live.”

“Whyever not! We might compete then with those northern kettles you hate so much -”

“Give _that_ to the northerners as well? What thoughts you have! Would you give them everything - the land, the sacred songs, your own children? They’d take it, and you’d sell it, I’m sure! Give them slow-down songs boxed up in tin - ship it to sundry lands - as if they had any right to it - those hurry-hurry roadrunning fat-sail know-nothings -”

“I’m not giving them anything! And you’ve no right to tell me not to!” Isva had no idea how to begin to counter Elavin, but she was not, she was _not_ standing down again this time, after all the other times, she was tired of being that complacent little daughter-by-marriage who squirmed beneath her expectations, she _would not._ “They’re my songs as much as yours. I didn’t say I _wanted_ to sell them, just that I could, that I - and you - it’s just _tea!_ I want you - I want you out of my house.”

That was it, then. Isva closed her eyes a moment and trembled. That was when they cast her out, for saying such things - or else she had a right to. Anthem’s right, hers by marriage, and her own house, they had _said_ it was her own house… Her spine had never felt so tall, and ached with the stiffness of it.

Elavin drooped. She said, “The world will be burned to embers before I die, and me an old woman.” But she turned to the door, and she walked out it.

That was it, Isva thought, walking to the door and watching Elavin start down the road. She wanted to call after her - habit, to apologize, to ask if she could send anything, if Elavin might accept help down the road. She would not give in to it. She would not go back. Water ran downhill.

She went downhill. Rainclouds were gathering behind her, and in the wind of their coming she was grateful for her cloak. And angry. And apologetic in a heterogeneous alloy. She had planned to go back up to the pastures when Elavin left; she went downhill to the market, while no one knew where she was or what she had fought over.

She hadn’t been to the market in more than a year. It felt like the wonder-stories she told to her children about far-off ports, where anything could be bought or sold and everyone was speaking Shoal-pidgin in a fast, rattling tone that Isva couldn’t understand. There was more bustle to it, more urgency than Isva had ever experienced - Taikvey people didn’t hurry. They didn’t have to.

She found herself sticking to the edge of the market, pressed against the wall - _pressed out of her own market_ \- hurrying behind stalls selling knives sharpened with foreign magic, tools sung out of moonlight, salt raised from the dirt in Kol. The market guards wore Shoal clothing, and new stalls had sprung up to change taisk coins for Shoal currency, three to one. The goods were not anything new, but all the little differences made it seem eldritch, a goblin market. Not part of Taikaika at all.

She found a taisk shop at the edge of the market, quiet and labeled in taisk lettering, though there was a translation in Shoal-pidgin tacked up underneath. They sold metals and jewelry and reproductions, and she did her business there and hurried away again, keeping out of that eldritch assembly of unharmonious voices. Finding quieter stretches of the city.

She stopped by her parents’ house on the way back, pretending not to be upset. And relaxed, in their familiar company. They told her that her sister had joined a community orchestra, and that she should bring the children with her next time she came to town, to play with their cousins. She promised she would, in a few days or a week, when she finished the surprise she was making with this new tin she had purchased, and she walked back in the rain in the tight-woven cloak that Anthem’s parents had given her. She was warm and dry, and so much of her existence depended on others.

She dragged her boot along the water bar, justifying her usefulness, her existence, her necessity to others. She hugged the tin she’d purchased close. If all else failed, if all were taken from her for her effrontery in throwing Elavin out - well, the light in that merchant’s eyes told her that she could do well enough for herself. Even if she had to learn Shoal-pidgin to do it.

Anthem saw the tin and laughed, as if her coming in the door when it was raining was always funny. “More time in the pastures for Balang and Fermata?” he asked.

“I can pay them myself,” Isva said, holding out her hand, the coins loose in it. Anthem’s eyes widened.

“Where did you get that?”

“A merchant. Taikvey.” She had made sure to find a Taikvey merchant, though the coins he gave her were Shoal. “It turns out some people do want my invention.”

“Well, it’s bitter tea we’ll have now they have your thing,” said Anthem. “Shall I put some on?”

“My thiassi. After the theaceae. I got the tin to make more of my thiassis. For us, and my parents, my sister and yours. It was quite a lot of money.”

“I imagine so,” said Anthem, to whom it was nothing. “Do you want tea?”

She didn’t know how to explain to him that she had fought with his mother, or why, or how to justify what she had done that day. She said, “Please,” and let him make it, and took up her mending, and sang a time-measure song while it steeped so that she wouldn’t forget.

If she were better at time-measure songs this would never have come up, but her brain and her mouth had never quite connected the way they were supposed to, and songs did not come naturally out of her. She got distracted, thought about things like - like the way water dripped off a tin roof, and then it was later and her tea was well past done, and she was building a device and everything ran together like water.

“I’m tired,” she said to Anthem.

“It’s been a long day,” he said. “Stop thinking. Drink your tea and go to bed. I’ll take care of the rest.”

“You’re taking care of everything, lately.”

“You’re doing other things.” He paused. “It’s one of the things I like about you. When I’m with my parents everything is farming, and trade, and - that’s never all it will be when you’re around. I like that I’m not just… heir, when you’re around.”

“Maybe don’t go down to the fields every day, then.”

“That’s not…” He ran a hand through his hair. “I don’t mind being heir. I just don’t want that to be all that I am, and I like that you will never just be one thing. I like that you challenge me to be more, too.”

Isva stared at him. “Anthem,” she said, “are you telling me that you love me?”

Something changed in his face, like she’d broken a dam they’d built together.

“Yes, dammit!” he said. “I love you. I love Davvi. I love Mehndi, too. I love my life, even the difficult parts of it! And I want to be able to say that to you.”

She didn’t know what to say. This was not how they talked, not how their marriage worked, and she didn’t have a script for this, a joke Anthem would enjoy, a familiar point of conversation.

She said, “You’re shouting.” And, “You’ll wake the children.”

It was not the right thing to say. He turned and walked out of the room, and left the kettle boiling over the stove.

There was not much joy in churning out reproductions. A few tweaks here and there, but no dramatic discoveries that resulted in overhauling the whole system. The time for that was past. She knew when she was going awry, and when she was wasting time for the joy of holding her tools again, and when she was cutting corners because she was tired of being bent over a bit of tin when she could be up in the fields again, moving, before winter came and penned them all inside. She wore her cloak more consistently now, against wind as well as weather. Against looking at Anthem, when he was hurt and silent.

When the canisters were done she took Mehndi and Davvi into the port town to see their maternal grandparents, who were not as free with gifts but had the aura of adventure about them from living in the city. Isva’s parents were delighted to see the children, reminding Isva of another family duty she had neglected. When her father had taken the children out for rye biscuits, her mother rounded on her.

“What is eating you? You look as if you have no joy,” she said.

Isva tried to think how to explain all she had done wrong, and found herself again grasping at a concept too large for her. She wanted to say that she couldn’t touch anyone, that everything felt far and distant. “Amma,” she said, “I angered Anthem’s parents.” And then, “I fought with Anthem.”

“Oh, my sweet,” said her amma. “Are you fighting with everyone you’re living with?”

“I’m not mad at them! I just… I thought that Anthem and I didn’t… The other night he told me he loved me, and I didn’t. Answer him. So he’s mad at me.”

“You always were a literal child,” said Amma. “You don’t have to tell him you love him. Tell him what you do feel about him.”

That was dark and complex as the patterns wind made before dawn in fields of mist and wheat. “I could be an awfully long time speaking.”

“He’ll like that.” Isva looked at her sharply. Her mother said, “He likes to watch you talk.”

Isva thought about that, and how quiet she’d been for months, how she had tried to fit herself into what she thought Anthem and Elavin wanted, until she could have screamed with how confined she’d been. And Anthem had watched. And told her that he liked that she was not all what his parents wanted.

“I’ve been a fool,” she said.

“Oh, now. We’re all fools when we’re young.”

“And when you grow old?”

“Then we are older fools. Come now, you’ve seen your father, playing in the kitchen.”

Baba had never been able to cook, and was overproud of all his attempts. Isva smiled. “That reminds me. I brought presents,” she said, and went to rummage in her pack while her mother took the change of subject and murmured on about it not even being Aikvím, burbling as time took them away from heavier subjects.

“Not all gifts are for festivals. Some gifts are just because -'' The words stuck in Isva’s throat, as if denying them to Anthem meant she could not offer them to anyone. “Anyway, you know how I am with forgetting things. I made this to help.”

Her mother took the little pot, canister, balloon and held them drooping in her hands. “Ah, a kelle!” she said.

“A what?”

“A kelle. They just started carrying them down at the market. It plays a slow-down song to bring the tea faster. Ingenious, aren’t they?”

Isva sat still, not sure if she were more stunned by the news that her invention had a name, that they were being sold already in the markets - _how_? - or that her mother admired a thing she had done.

“I made this,” she said. “I - I brought the first one to market a few weeks ago. I was going to call it a thiassi.”

“They’ve only been there for a week,” Amma agreed. “Expensive little things, it was nice of you to think of me. The northerners have been buying them up -”

“No!” Isva said, feeling like it was Elavin coming out of her mouth. She hadn’t meant for this to spread, she’d only sold the one of them. “They can’t - they’re ours, they’re _mine_ , they’ll take them like they took everything else, bit by bit… They’ll spread it all over the sea, like their kettles and those knives, and no one will ever know where it came from or what song it is… they’ll _sell_ it, you can’t _sell_ a _song_ …”

“People do it all the time, it’s called a performance,” said Amma. “Anyone can sing a song, it’s no fault of yours.”

“Anyone can sing a song, but they’re not the one who put it in a box and packaged it! I wanted…”

What had she wanted? Money of her own, not given to her by Anthem and his parents? Assurance that she could survive their ostracization? Or just… to be seen, noticed, for someone to recognize that though she may be unable to compose, she had still found a way to make music that wrought change upon the world.

“I wanted to impress people,” she said, because that was the measliest, vilest way to express that thought. “And now they’ll take it everywhere, and no one will ever know it was mine, and they’ll sell it like contraband under someone else’s name.”

“Contraband? That’s going a bit far.”

“It isn’t, though! They’ll - they’re smart people, the northerners, they know they can’t fight us while we have our military canons, but I’ve just boxed it up and given it to them…” She put a hand across her mouth, realizing what she had said, what she had done. “We’ve kept away from them because we’re small and unimportant, but they’re not ignoring us now, and when they see what we can do with a thiassi…”

“Now you’re just overwrought. Calm down and eat something, we’ll have tea. Listen - the water’s hot.”

And from the next room, Isva heard the klaxon scream of a whistling kettle, and realized that her mother was right; the thiassi made no difference. It was already too late. The Shoal-folk were in every kitchen and every heart, and it was not her genius they had used, but her indifference. And Elavin was right: her world would be burned to embers for it.

**Author's Note:**

> Theaceae is the family of plants that includes the tea plant (as well as camellias).
> 
> You may also be interested in reading about the physics of time in A Brief History of the Universe, which is I believe where I got the description of spacetime as a loaf. Unfortunately all my books are in boxes right now, so I can't double check.
> 
> If you are interested in fugues and mathematics, you can read more about them in Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas R Hofstadter.
> 
> Any errors in animal husbandry are entirely my own.  
> -Nimblermortal


End file.
